


As Yearning Lips to Unyielding Stone

by SanSanFanFan



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, Pining, Renaissance Rome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-07-09
Packaged: 2020-06-25 08:30:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19741963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SanSanFanFan/pseuds/SanSanFanFan
Summary: Inspired by this amazing art of Crowley and a statue of Aziraphale: https://nel314.tumblr.com/post/186077478620/that-time-when-the-demon-visited-the-artistsCrowley follows a talented apprentice sculptor back to their workshop and discovers a breathtaking, and so very familiar, piece of art.





	As Yearning Lips to Unyielding Stone

“Master, master!”

Gasparo barely glanced up from the plate of ribs he was gnawing on, and when he did finally give his terrified apprentice attention, he spoke with a mouth full of swine flesh, “What is it now, Niccolo?!”

“A man followed me all the way back from Piazza Navona!” Niccolo’s eyes were wide and panicked.

“What did you steal you vagabond?!”

“Nothing. I was just catching faces!” Niccolo held up a fist full of scraps of paper, showing his master sketches of market stall traders and passers-by in conversation and looking at wares. Happy, sad, old, young, he had caught so many faces today, but he’d caught something else as well. Someone’s attention.

“Damn you boy, you must have caught the face of a spy or a murderer. He will no doubt kill you in your sleep and I will have to put Borso on faces and you know he’s ham-fisted! He can’t do noses, and the commissions for Il Magnifico will be ruined!”

Amongst the dust and marble block the boys started laughing, likely at Borso, began but they were cut off suddenly as Gasparo stood, wiping his greasy hands on his smock and went to grab for the boy.

“Good day, sir!” A cheerful sounding voice rang out in the studio as a dark figure stood by the doorway.

Gasparo stopped looming over Niccolo and instead his greedy eyes looked over the newcomer, noting the quality of the velvets that made up the rich black of his doublet. Darkened glass sat in eyeglasses on his face, with golden wire hooking them to his ears under long flowing red locks. A very heavy looking purse made of black satin and tied with a golden rope swings casually at his hip.

“Porco cane, Niccolo!” Hissed Gasparo to his wide-eyed apprentice. “That is no Milanese spy!” He straightened up and rushed over to greet the fine-looking gentleman. “Good day signor Crowley, welcome to the workshop of Gasparo Barbarigo, sculptor to many fine patrons of Rome.”

Behind his dark glasses Crowley was taking in the marble dust and the shapes under tarpaulins, as well as the much too skinny boys looking out from behind them. “I see I am at a disadvantage, since you know me, but I have never come across your work before.”

Niccolo stifled a giggle at the subtle slight, knowing there would be payment for his laughter later in a beating.

“Yes, of course, I am familiar with the patron of arts, Signor Crowley, arrived just recently in Rome, coming from Florence with Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. Michelangelo now works on the tomb for the Pope, does he not?” Gasparo cannot keep the envy out of his words, and Crowley raises a single eyebrow at the man’s naked sin.

“He does,” Crowley says, lifting the edge of tarpaulin to peer at the marble flesh beneath.

“Apologies, we were not expecting you, and we have not got the studio ready for guests.” He gestures quickly at the boys and they dart about unveiling the statues. The winged angels.

Crowley holds in a hiss at suddenly being surrounded by a host of _them_. But then he sees the work properly. Derivative. Uninspired. Lifeless. This Gasparo is no Michelangelo.

“A commission, for Il Magnifico.” Gasparo gloats.

“For Agostino’s new villa? Wonderful, his parties will be made even worse by angelic gate-crashers!”

Signor Crowley does not sound pleased and Gasparo is on a back foot, unsure of how to proceed with this very big fish that he so desperately wants to hook, while having nothing to tempt him with.

“Where’s your boy that scribbles people’s faces in the market place?” Crowley asks, almost too casually.

Gasparo seizes the moment and shoves Niccolo towards the lean man in black. “Here he is! I hope he did not anger you, signor. I can have anything he drew of you burnt immediately! By god, I swear it!”

“Oh, please don’t.” The angular man says with a grimace, then he holds out a hand for the boy’s work. And Niccolo, trembling, passes him the sketches to be appraised by Signor Crowley’s hidden eyes, still scared a little of a man whose face he cannot entirely see.

There are common-folk and rich-folk alike in Niccolo’s work, and each captured at a moment in time when their souls are shining through their faces like the sun through grey clouds. A woman enchanted by her daughter laughing at a puppet show. A stall owner extolling the virtues of the silks he has on sale, enjoying the run of them over his hands. A very fair-haired man biting deeply into a pear, ecstasy on his face. The same man chatting with a gentleman and his wife and caught moments later bowing deeply to them. The same man running his appraising fingers over the spines of recently bound volumes of Columbus’ Prophecies.

Crowley knows exactly what the man was looking at because he was also watching Aziraphale in the Piazza Navona, and had been contemplating going over to greet his old associate when he’d spotted Niccolo scribbling away. And it seems that the boy has been as interested as him in the angel’s activities, capturing his likeness beyond just his appearance. There is something intrinsically Aziraphale coming through the paper and almost burning Crowley’s fingertips with angelic fire as he touches the pages.

“I see you have a favourite subject here, boy,” Crowley says, reluctantly handing the sketches back to the apprentice.

“Ah, that is Signor Aziraphale.” Niccolo says, a smile bursting out on his face, “I’ve sketched him many times before, he has such a wonderful expressive face! He’s caught me at it in the past, and now he says that I can draw him whenever I wish. Sometimes he even gives me a coin when he spots me. But for some reason, he always has to pretend that it comes out of my ear!”

Crowley holds in a groan.

Gasparo grunts, “You did not mention this new ‘patron’, Niccolo. Nor any of his coins!”

“Well, I don’t think that matters, does it maestro Barbarigo?” There is a dangerous edge in Crowley’s voice until he turns to the boy again, “Your work is very good, Niccolo.”

“He works mostly on the faces, but I have given him the responsibility of an entire statue for Il Magnifico,” Gasparo says, realising that the boy somehow has the strange man’s favour and that he should change tack.

“Show me?” Crowley asks, his heart already doing odd things in his chest as a suspicion begins to build. The skinny apprentice, no more than fifteen years old, ushers him to the very back of the workshop where a statue sits in a patch of light coming through a broken part of the roof. Niccolo unveils it at Gasparo’s sharp command, and Crowley nods quietly as though he hasn’t just been presented with the partially clothed form of his friend born in gleaming white marble that shines with his very essence. Around the statue, even more sketches of Signor Aziraphale are pinned to the walls, and the very talented Niccolo has breathed life into the stone through his adoration of the kind gentleman.

“Magnificent,” Crowley says eventually.

“It’s a fair likeness,” Gasparo mutters, envy defeating his sense of self-preservation and greed. “Niccolo has nimble fingers for finer work. But he does not yet have a master’s eye for form and flow-”

“Oh, I disagree. But I think now you should go back to wolfing down whatever it was that still stinks on your breath.” Crowley clicks his fingers and Gasparo turns and walks off, his eyes blank and empty.

Crowley moves slowly about the statue, circling it as he has circled the angel since the dawn of creation. The angel holds a text, of course, but he is showing it to the viewer as his eyes are closed in bliss, as though the humble act of sharing has affected him. Cloth is wound about his legs, the folds crafted as though they are about to tumble, so real they look even in stone. But it is the angel’s bare shoulders and the lines of his neck leading into that transcendent face that claim Crowley, and he forgets to breathe for a moment.

He reaches into his purse and pulls out enough coin to feed the workshop for a month. “Boy, take these, and your friends and the charming Gasparo, and please spend the rest of the evening in the taverna.”

Niccolo doesn’t need to be asked twice, reaching for the golden coins with thin fingers, revealing a small painting on the skin of his forearm, a self-made tattoo curling by his wrist. Crowley grabs his wrist in a sharp swift action to look closer.

“What’s this? More art?”

Niccolo smiles, “A sailor taught me the technique. But I think maybe signor that you already know about the tattooing art? And we both seem to like snakes.” Niccolo’s free hand traces the tangles of Crowley’s snake tattoo onto his own cheekbone, copying the pattern. “I like yours. Mine has fewer twists in it as the needle I made for it was too thick.”

Crowley looks deeply into the apprentice’s essence and spots hidden something deep in the boy’s metaphysical nature that he had once reassured Aziraphale wouldn’t be possible. _Hello there little snakelet_ , he thinks, _no wonder you’ve been crafting stars in this squalid dump of a workshop. Well, well, well!_ (1)

Alone, once Niccolo has finally taken the coin and gathered up the band of starving apprentices and their blustering master, Crowley returns to orbiting the ethereal, angelic, star. He takes off his eye glasses and gazes up at the face of the angel and… and… _yearns_.

Crowley has known that he is drawn to the angel for centuries now. Millennia even. He cannot entirely put words to the feeling. But now, here in this falling down workshop in a more squalid part of Rome, he can put actions to the feeling.

The marble is cold to touch, not like Aziraphale.

Once, Crowley had run his fingertips along the longest of his feathers as the angel had surrendered to him, telling him he could do what he wanted with him. He remembers that moment in the hold of the Ark, and he closes his eyes as his fingertips meet stone feathers and breathes out a small sigh when they stand solid against his touch. He remembers the warmth of Aziraphale as he held him under him, pinning him against himself as their ‘fight’ came to an all too quick end. The angel hadn’t wanted to fight at all, but his surrender hadn’t felt like pretending.

Crowley leans closer, his cheek a breath away from the angel’s shoulder as his arm curls about its shoulders, black-nailed fingertips tracing lines on the whiteness there.

“I need… I need…” He begins, and then ends the thought by manifesting a local wine in a rough silver goblet. He’d followed Michelangelo to Rome because he’d had nothing better to do, but he hates the city. He hates the multiplying consecrated grounds that he has to skip around if he just wants to get across town to a better taverna. He hates the crucified reminders of a kind man he met once in a desert, painted and sculpted everywhere as well as hanging about the bloody necks of the wealthy, his poor broken body encrusted with rubies and diamonds. He hates the stink and the heat. He hates it all and were it not for having spotted Aziraphale in the market today… he drinks.

He drinks _deeply_ , sloppily. Ruby red spills from his lips and splashes onto the statue. He wipes it with a sleeve cuff, and the motion turns into a gentle caress. He drinks until his lips unlock and words fall out after the wine as his face gets closer to the statue’s shoulder, his eyes unfocusing and staring off into the darkness.

“D’you remember tha’story. About the statue and the sculptor? D’you ‘member? Of course, you do. You know all their stories. You like the ones about us… us kind of beings. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before though, angel. There’s this sculptor. Talented guy. Like that Niccolo. Good kid. Might throw him a job to do soon that’ll get him out of here and away from that lout. Anyways, there’s this sculptor and he makes this pretty, pretty statue. Carved her all out of ivory – bloody horrible things they do to elephants to get that you know – and she’s so pretty that he forgets all about how he’s said he’ll never love a woman. Yes, yes, maybe he was just not that way inclined. But that’s not the point of the story. He asks one of them Greek gods to make her a real woman – you’d know which one, you always know – and she does. He kisses her, and the cold ivory feels warm…”

He turns his head ever so slightly, his lips brushing against the cold marble, his fingers resting about the neck of the angel in ecstasy as he dares to dream that the stone warms under his touch.

Crowley snarls and wills away the wine, throwing it back to the cup of Gasparo just as the man is complaining that his wine has vanished to the amusement of the taverna owner who thinks he’s just splashed it on the ground in his drunkenness. Which he then does in his shock.

The demon though is suddenly and profoundly sober, and still a breath away from the chill flesh of the artificial angel. He finds himself pressing his lips to stone again, this time closing his serpent eyes as he breathes deeply, trying to recall the thunderstorm and honey scent he’d once encountered in the middle of the Flood. Its there on the tip of his tongue as his brows knit and he searches for more life in the marble.

“Oh, my dear.” He hears the angel saying, remembering the lightness of his voice, sweet in his ears, and imagining what he might have said if he had actually crossed the Piazza to speak with him as Aziraphale had caressed the spines of the prophecies. “How wonderful to see you in Rome!”

“It’s a shit hole. A gaudy jewel in the crown of an empire eating itself.”

“Well… its better for seeing you in it. Come, let’s walk by the banks of the Tiber and you can tell me all about your business here while the sun sets?”

“No, tell me about yours, angel. Tell me softly about the goodness you are unfurling in the city of seven hills?”

A hesitant hand reaches for the arc of the stone angel’s wing, fingertips feeling out the carvings of every individual feather, so delicately done that he can feel every barb as soft as snow. A rustling about him as the wing raises up over his head, protecting him from the first rain. The two of them standing at the top of the wall, and he’d been so alone until he met the angel who gave away his sword.

“And after our walk?” he asks, his eyes closed as his mind’s eye opens. “Where should we go then?”

“I know a place that does the most delightful little marzipan creations!” The angel would say brightly.

“Yes, yes, perfect. I’ll watch you eat powdered marzipan fruits as we keep strolling the streets, crossing the piazzas and wandering up the steps. Walking but going nowhere.” His other hand feels slowly down the solid folds of the cloth draping across the angel and finds a bare leg, smooth and turned slightly in the angel’s repose. His fingers curl about the curve of the muscle there, imagining each finger tip turning the white to pink rosy flesh as it passes, the angel shivering under his touch, his lips ever closer to the statue’s shoulder again as he breaths heavily.

“And then angel? And then?”

“We’ll do as thou wilt, my dear.” The words are an echo and fade just as they do. Crowley opens his eyes and stares into the darkness as he comes back to himself.

He’s utterly contained again as Niccolo and the rest of the apprentices return after the midnight clocks ring out, carrying Gasparo as he sinks towards the ground in his drunkenness.

“Ah, signor Crowley, you are still here?” Asks Niccolo, his curious eyes meeting the dark eyeglasses on the patron’s face and reading nothing in them.

“I wanted to talk to you about a commission.”

“Of course, signor. But maestro Gasparo is a little indisposed…” The apprentices dump him against the rock Aziraphal- Niccolo’s angel is standing on and his head falls back heavily onto the angel’s calf. Crowley nudges him with a black embossed leather slipper and he slides down into the dust of the workshop floor, a plume of it spreading outwards from him like debris from a meteor strike.

“No, not a commission for this one. For you.”

“Signor, you honour me. I will do my best to-”

“Two angels. Wrestling. One of them appears to be getting the upper hand. But perhaps they might be fighting the wrong opponents.”

He expects Niccolo to be confused, but he nods. “Of course, I can bring you some sketches soon signor.”

“No. Just carve it. I know you will be inspired, you have creation in your blood.” Crowley smiles wryly. “And this one, when will you deliver it to Il Magnifico’s villa with the others?”

“Soon, signor.”

“Perhaps I do have a reason to attend one of his dull parties again.”

***

He finds the angel in front of Niccolo’s angel a few weeks later, his hands crossed happily across his belly as he stares up at the marble ethereal being. The statue has been settled into its new home amid a bed of recently planted blooming white roses at the fat merchant’s new villa, and Agostino Chigi himself is leading an array of Romans about the selection of angels, pointing out the very expensive Carrara marble and the excessive number of them. Crowley thinks pointedly that Il Magnifico wouldn’t know a good sculpture from a piss-poor one, but the angel does, and he seems enraptured by Niccolo’s angel.

“Spotted a friend?” Crowley says quietly as he appears from somewhere behind him and moves to his left side.

“Oh Crowley! Isn’t it wonderful! The drape of the fabric, the detail on the feathers-”

“The familiar face?”

“Oh no, just a passing resemblance really.” Aziraphale blushes and it is lovely. “And I think Gasparo’s apprentice took a little creative license with the body as well.”

Crowley looks speculatively at the stone angel as though he’s never seen it before, and then looks at Aziraphale over the top of his glasses, giving him a rare glimpse of his unique eyes and raising an even greater red mark on his cheeks. “Oh, I don’t know, angel, I think he’s carved the essence of you. But marble is a poor substitute for the real deal.”

Aziraphale is shocked to silence, and Crowley tries to backtrack quickly, his heart in his mouth and tangling with his tongue. “I j-just meant that… it’s just a statue okay. So, are you in Rome for long?” He feels the conversation straining under the forced change of subject.

“A little while. And yourself?”

“I've commissioned a piece that I’m waiting to collect.”

“Crowley, I didn’t realise that you were a patron of the arts?!”

“Well, it also gives me time enough to tempt Michelangelo into adding some familiar faces to his next project in the Sistine Chapel.” He looks up at Aziraphale’s face in the marble above them and smiles devilishly.

“You wouldn’t!”

“Don’t you think we deserve to make an appearance, angel? We were there at the beginning too.” He smirks.

Aziraphale laughs and claps a hand over his mouth almost immediately. “Oh, you! Come, let us walk along the river and talk about all that you have been up to since we last met.”

They move away from Niccolo’s angel and amble through the bright beds of flowers, full of bees and life. “And then, angel, where should we go after our walk?”

“Wherever you want to, Crowley.” Aziraphale smiles brightly up at him, and Crowley is reminded of the press of yearning lips to resisting stone and the drunken hope that it would begin to yield. _One day_ , he thinks, _one day…_

“Let’s just see where we end up, angel.” He smiles back.

**Author's Note:**

> (1) The story of how Crowley adopted a pack of ‘snakelets’ and wrestled with Aziraphale during the Flood is in the fic 'Two by Two': https://archiveofourown.org/works/19711804


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